What Should We Lead With?

By Roger Rosenblatt

Journalists put the question in practical terms: What should we lead with? The rest of the population asks it more generally: What matters most? It comes to the same puzzle. Survey events in a given period of time and try to come up with the single moment, the headline, by which the world may be characterized, stopped in its spin. In the past couple of weeks, the press has stood chest-high in choices. In Lebanon: one more last battle for Beirut; the disintegration of the Gemayel government; the pull-out of the U.S. Marines. In the Soviet Union: the death of Yuri Andropov and the succession of Konstantin Chernenko; a funeral in red. In Iowa: the small beginnings of an American presidential election; the first funny hats and toots of the horns. In Sarajevo: one more Winter Olympics done; memories on videotape; the ice dancers Torvill and Dean synchronized, as if accidentally, like birds in a wind. Four major acts, then: war, ceremony, process, grace.

What should we lead with? What matters most? Let us concede from the start that the problem is subjective, that whatever choice we settle on will be formed more by habit than by a command of history; the press is not in control of history. Getting bored with Beirut? It's not unheard of (if you don't live there). Every few weeks another upheaval; the familiar picture of a crushed Mercedes, a balcony split open like stale cake. One hears that the American people are growing tired of the Middle East as a whole. Too bad. The region matters, it's a lead. Boring or not, Beirut may be the center of the world, the place where everything comes together or apart.

So, too, for Moscow these past two weeks. After the obsequies and the miles of citizen mourners, half the world closes ranks behind another mystery. Who is this Chernenko, Brezhnev's former water boy turned master of the house? After Iowa, who is Mondale? Walter, we thought we knew you, but now we'd better look a bit closer at him who may become the leader of the other half of the world. Which leaves us with Sarajevo, the least important place on our current events map. Perhaps.

But before we say so definitely, play it again, that ice dance performed by the two Brits. I don't think that I caught it all the first time. I think I missed one of the turns of her head, or an extension of his arm, the way they came together or apart.

Here's what one would like to say: that Torvill and Dean's routine was more important in its sublimity than all the shootings and elections tune can -- muster; that life is short and art is long; and that the skating dance, brief and evanescent as it is, represents a perfection in which the entire universe may be encompassed. Theodore Roethke described such an effect in a poem: "A ripple widening from a single stone. Winding around the waters of the world." Nice. It may even be true. Yet it is just as likely that Beirut is the widening ripple by which everything is framed.

What we confront in making such choices is not the events alone, but ourselves; and it is ourselves we are not able to place in order. The mind, as fickle as a Southern belle, swishes rapidly from battles to dances, enthralled equally with every suitor, enthralled with itself. Tell me a story about my mind, Mr. News. Did I overturn a government this week? Did I come to power? Did I win an election? Did I skate flawlessly again? Was I murderous, decorous, triumphant, beautiful? And if I was all those things, how should I order my priorities so as to know what is truly human, the essential prevailing act? The question is not what the press decrees is this week's news. The question is us. What should we lead with? What matters most?

In another poem, Roethke suggested that the widening ripple is ourselves:

I lose and find myself in the long water; l am gathered together once more; I embrace the world.

We do that every week, cursing and awestruck at all we are. --By Roger Rosenblatt